%{{tag.tag}} {{articledata.title}} {{moment(articledata.cdate)}} @{{articledata.company.replace(" ","")}} comment John Martinis, the 2025 Nobel prize winner in physics, says that the threat posed to Bitcoin (CRYPTO: $BTC ) and other cryptocurrencies by quantum computers is real. In a media interview, Martinis, who helped build Google's (NASDAQ: $GOOGL ) quantum computers, warned that Bitcoin is likely to be among the earliest targets of the technology. The award-winning physicist warned that a quantum computer could break Bitcoin's encryption in minutes and poses a serious threat to the entire cryptocurrency sector. "It's not something that has zero probability; people have to deal with this," said Martinis in the interview, referencing a Google paper on the threats posed to crypto by quantum computers. The Google paper, which generated waves globally, outlines how a sufficiently advanced quantum computer could derive a Bitcoin private key within minutes and breach the network. "It turns out that breaking cryptography is one of the easier applications for quantum computing, because it's very numeric," said Martinis. "These are the smaller, easier algorithms. The low-hanging fruit." Unlike traditional financial systems, which can migrate to quantum-resistant encryption, Bitcoin faces a more complex challenge. The decentralized structure of BTC makes upgrades slower and more contentious, the Nobel Prize winner said in the interview. On a positive note, Martinis said that the threat to crypto is not imminent, noting that a quantum computer capable of such an attack remains one of the hardest engineering challenges today. Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on macroscopic quantum phenomena. He is widely known for leading Google's quantum hardware program, including the 2019 "quantum supremacy" experiment. Martinis is now the co-founder of Qolab, a company developing superconducting quantum computers. GOOGL stock has increased 105% in the last 12 months to trade at $300 U.S. per share.